


tell tom tildrum that tim toldrum is dead

by feltstrips



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Abuse of citations, Age Difference, Blackwatch Era, Blackwatch Sombra AU, F/F, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, Minor Violence, POV Second Person, Recreational Drug Use, This shit again - freeform, Workplace Relationship, prose
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-28
Updated: 2019-01-28
Packaged: 2019-10-18 08:08:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17577077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feltstrips/pseuds/feltstrips
Summary: Carbon monoxide is not a solid substance but if anyone could solidify gas just to shove it down your throat, she would.Or; Olivia "Sombra" Colomar derails her promising career in black market infobroking and joins the military.





	tell tom tildrum that tim toldrum is dead

**Author's Note:**

> literally what is with me and deleting fics only to reupload them this is like the fifth time ive done this. but remember before sombra came out in full and everyone was drawing her in a cool sugar skull mask? took that and ran with it

Her lab is like a hospital room been put through a sci-fi set until all the clunky edges and oxidized-yellow-blue plastic light covers went streamlined, white-on-white-on glowing, toxic breath neon. The poison fad of the 1920s would have suited her; The Broadway Pie Pastry Poisoner, reincarnate, she moves like she’s gotten away with it.

And the first walkabout was straight out of a blockbuster; slow-down music, her flare ‘o red hair grabbing your eye and holding it like a sunbeam from a right angle, lighting up your iris snap-crackle-violent-violet. Block the sun with a finger (1994, Julia Alvarez) and keep your eye on her while you walk, following the tour lines but rubbernecking to beat the band. You have always liked that expression. Beat the band; jump into the orchestra pit/onstage and go ham with the nearest tuba/electric guitar (this metaphor is choose-your-own-adventure because you can’t decide between the mental image of you beating the shit out of Billy Ray Cyrus or like, Beethoven, both are good). You thought _I could be in love with her, couldn’t I._

That first driveby you felt the foreshadowing in the air, you heard the audience shush/stone the guy who pointed it out. Clumsy directing, stole this scene from Devil's Advocate (2002, you believe, but honestly you're not going to fact check the release date on a 70-year-old movie). She feels your sunlit eye on her and looks up from a frothing beaker. Stares back, raised head, raised eyebrow, raised hand, that twisted little lip-curl smile that went right to your clit, heart, and head, in that order. The camera rotoscoped so hard Commander R-something paused in leading you around this very-secret-oh-yes facility by the nose and had to glance over his shoulder, give you a imperious look that you'd probably get on your knees for in a different context and if he didn’t, like, remind you so much of your dead dad. (that got off track because now you are thinking about Miss Slick-Back Redhead Science P.h.D and kind of turned on and very confused). Haha. But.

When Commander Uhh finally meandered his slow-swagger way over to her lab, the one that glowed from the inside with a sort of sinister blood-vessel dentist's-office light, a brief lull in his “this is the bunk hall lucky fucks arent we we get our own rooms this is the mess hall we spent way too much funding on this is the training room the holodeck the time machine blah blah blah im casually nonchalant and youve already imprinted on me like a baby duck haven't you kid” (okay, he didn't say that last bit, that's just you), you weren’t burnt out enough to ignore the ultraviolet-power smell seeping from around the lab's door. It set you highwire wild, a little bit.

And you saw her again from behind the layers of glass, refracted and sweeping with teleportation ease between the panels of metal holding it all together. That's your second impression. The woman who lives and works in the glass house, brick windows pointedly absent and the whole thing held together with steel and wiring microscope slide-mashed in the walls. You can trace every light switch back to the breaker, tell where the steel security curtains would hit the floor. It says she has nothing to hide. Which is bullshit, obviously.

She opens the door with a hermetically-sealed squelch and is smiling, suddenly. Commander Rrrr-?? returns the gesture with the corner of his mouth.

“Newbie,” he said, hands in his pockets, sidestepped to expose you, “Showing her around.”

She looked you up and down quick like a printer scan and held out a Voldemort-knuckle-pale hand, wrist bone bumped towards the ceiling, her whole narrow torso tilting into the motion and her long long fingers splayed a little, angled. You grasped it and her fingers felt like carbon fiber made flesh.

She side-eyed him and said “Gabriel,” still shaking your hand, two smooth up-down motions that taper end before she finishes the sentence, “another so young?” and of course she has an accent, something cold and deep that colors her words northern green.

Commander Gabriel shrugged, bared his teeth a little, the way a wolfhound laughs. “This one came to me.”

Well. If by came to he meant hacked/blackmailed her way in, then yeah, okay. You glanced at the cue card offstage and found your line scrawled as “improv good luck”. Should’a been speaking already.

“Sweet, I'm not solo at the kiddy table, then,” you said, nonsensically, missing the bullseye by ten miles south, “nice to meet you. Call me Sombra.”

She finally acknowledged you and you very strongly wished to be a piece of game meat on a platter, what with the hungry curiosity in her stoplight-color-contrast eyes.

“The name suits you,” she said, “are you sick, Miss… Sombra?” Her voice could not get any deeper, smoother, and she endearingly says Sombra like Some-bruh.

You didn’t expect her to say what you’d heard a million times before. You grimaced, knowing she couldn’t see it behind the mask and the sunglasses and the hat and the layers of self-protection-reflection, shook your head. Commander Gabriel (who has that air of someone who offers up answers if they are slow in coming) backed you up, rubbed his very cool facial hair and said “Apparently it's just a thing with her.”

“Yeah, man,” you said, “I can say my expressions out loud if that would help.” (Internally: Frank, 2014, dir. Lenny Abrahamson). Gabriel snorted a little but her eyebrows just raised.

“Welcoming smile.”

He waved her back into the lab and you back to the hall-on-hall tour. You never caught her name, and that still seems very right.

\---

First things first: the minute you fully join the Blackwatch club you get a better _____cara_____ , face, as you've taken to calling your masks, your safety. _Better put your face on before the next train_ (Evil Woman, Electric Light Orchestra, Jet 1975). It takes you weeks to code it, install the meticulous wiring and work out the inevitable kinks. The end result is the most impressive ______cara______ you’ve ever gotten your hands out, plush with Blackwatch tech and, for sake of your reputation, a silent, sly nod to the life under the radar, you shaped it into your signature sugar skull.

The dwarf-ish guy (who, understandably, doesn’t get it when you call him Gimli) helps you trick it out with magnet ports (you’ve always wanted some sick bodymods) and the woman from the glass lab installs them without question. You’d pulled up the edges of your old, hospital-cloth face, pulled the wool over your own eyes and asked her not to use painkillers. Her teeth are flashed out at you before you ask, all-knowing, yes, she had that page bookmarked. There is a commonality in knowledge-power with you and with her. You think she didn't even hear your allergy excuse.

When you learned the woman of the glass laboratory's name, you lost a little bit of the rightness that came with your naivety, a purposeful blank filled in. So you let her work with (because work with sounds so much better than just saying she jabbed you with a scalpel a couple times, makes it seem like she was messing with- experimenting, you guess, gag in a good way) the ports and the placing, sharpie fumes in your covered eyes, her dead thing fingers braced against your jawbone, temples, the little bit you're willing to bare. Slow and slower and your blood is carbon-monoxide-poisoning-red on her ugly teal gloves. Closer than breathing.

She cauterizes the edges of your new anchors- cooks you, which smells like hell, and thank God you barely flinch, crack her a pointless smile.

“Hey, gorgeous,” you call her. Gore-jess and gorge-us. “Oye, preciosa,” say it in the mother tongue, and you learned her name is Moira O'Deorian from asking Commander Gabriel (Reyes, said Ray-Is, nice and historic, figured that out too) but who in their right mind would call something like her a name like that (Morai; ancient Greek, the three sisters, spinners of density). She is a whole lotta something (that you should never call the name of the fates, oh no).

She is washing your blood from her rubber glove hands.

“Let those heal in peace,” she says, because you pick scabs off like nobody's business and of course she knows that.

\---

She thinks she knows more than you. Such hot shit that she has this whole pack under her thumb. Like she could just pull the foundations of the world at the roots and watch it all come down, a god in the oldest sense, a Doberman-Sìth, old magic and her old-fashioned way of speech, the bite she puts in formal patterns. Maybe she could.

But you know people, and that’s worth so much more. She knows souls, you know what they’ll do to maintain their (stupid) (gimmicky) (amazing) exoskeletons, ______caras______ of their own, and you work quickly in your new home. Starting with her doesn't give you a lotta traction. She likes logic, no shit, logos to the bone, thank you, Aristotle. She doesn't give two shakes of a ducktail about Blackwatch or Overwatch. She likes being funded. She is the only person who gets your shitty tongue-in-cheek references, bizarrely, like- the woman must have watched every golden age Simpsons episode t'boot. Everyone else hates her guts at worst, tolerates her at best.

And, importantly; she enjoys the fact that she is taller than everyone, everyone-everyone, the only person who rivals her spider-skyscraper visage is Reinhardt and he avoids her like the plague or arsenic, Poudre De Succession. The poor man can’t be blamed. She seems the type to force-feed you carbon monoxide at the drop of a hat, or something else Jazz-Age killer meets futuristic bullshit. Carbon monoxide is not a solid substance- you think- but Jesús, if anyone could solidify gas just to shove it down a throat, she would.

She is taller than you. Natural intimidation. You’re used to it, as a 5-foot-let's-call-it-4 teenage scrapper who always got picked last for basketball and volleyball and hey-we-got-it-stuck-in-the-rafters-ball. She looms over you by a loose, overflowing handful of inches; you take it hard, for some reason, this personal assault driving you to higher and higher heeled boots. She notices. Duh. She can read you like a book within minutes of seeing you, like she dog-eared the flakes of your bones, joints, your apoptosis-ing suicide pact skin cells that yelled for attention just from her. She could cite them and watch you squirm. If she was so inclined.

But she isn’t so inclined. Infuriatingly. Like your Mama always (never) told you, the hardest nuts to crack are the ones with gold inside. Or something matronly and useless like that.

Like, you charm the whiskey-sweat blooded cowboy with Black-N-Milds whittled past the rules, half-hollow and stuffed with dope. You at least make the cyborg laugh once or twice, which is about as good as that guy gets, and you smother Gabe with casual affection and slivers of devotion, melt him down little by little until he lets you be putty in his hands. You make yourself at home in the ludicrous world of military playbunnies and raw soldiers. You enjoy yourself and no one asks your age, your name, no one sees you beyond the mask. They- the Watches of both Black and Over- stop asking it off eventually.

All but one, of course, because when you carry a torch you give up going unseen.

“Anything else, preciosa, and I'd do it in a heartbeat. Ask me to jump, I’ll ask how high, yeah? But not this. Don’t,” you tell her, let the unsaid please drift out into the air.

“No need for drama,” she said, as indifferent as if she had been denied a cup of sugar.

\---

You've let the dogsìth-glass-castle woman into your room (arent we lucky fucks), and by let you mean lured because, amusingly, you're the only one in a group of espionage experts who manages to smuggle pot on base (besides Gabriel, but he doesn't share).

She doesn't either, apparently; just tucks the generous 5-gram bag into her coat despite your unspoken plans of hotboxing the room, steeples her fingers in your direction, peers at you with that same starving curiosity. Your hackles raise at the scrutiny even as you bask in the attention.

“This isn't charity, I take it,” she says and _yeah,_ you want to say, _you did take it, but whatever._

“That’s a pretty serious turn of phrase for some weed,” you say instead, draped over your bed like a wad of silly putty melting on a radiator. She hum-chuckles low in her throat, a sound ubiquitous in its eroticism.

“Forgive me. I meant that I am going to pay you back.”

“Going to?”

“Tad short on pocket change at the moment,” she says, inclines her head and you have to force a noise or maybe just a ball of emotion down your throat at how fucking poised she is, set up on the edge of your swivel chair like she’s modeling for a baroque painting- or a woodcut, actually, sounds more her speed, Witches Presenting Wax Dolls to the Devil (1720, unknown artist). But you shrug, say “No sweat,” slide a couple inches closer to the edge of the bed. Money is fairly meaningless for you, as you don't pay tuition or rent or even for food. And, like, you've been up to your ears in hard-won blood money since 12-and-two-months, emphasis on blood (and hard-won, you guess, you’ve had to deal with a lot of gang members). So what? You'd give a fortune and a half to see her tight-wound languid silhouette framed against your wall. She's an old god but only you know where the bathroom is (2016, John Mulaney, paraphrase).

Since you're technically wearing the pants in this drug deal you see the opening and click into it, flip the switch, say “Y’know, baby, we could square it real quick- ass or cash, yeah?” tilt your voice up and make it sound like a joke, like you're giggling but still you poured your best honey-mouth fever into it. Her eyes widen and the whites flashbang you in the dim light.

“You are a child,” she says, but you know people (she's close enough) and you can tell she forced that thick disgust into her voice. A line of heat-shiver streaks up your torso, crotch to chin.

“Like you've never thought about it,” you breathe, as a statement, an unfettered truth. A challenge. The air is hot and stifling as it rushes into the filters of your mask. You expect her to show discomfort, fake it, something, but she smiles by twisting her lips up again- oh God- and lays back in the chair, lets her lab coat fold off her arms- oh God.

“Have I?”

“Yeah,” you say, “yeah, I know you have.”

She tilts her head back, smirks at the ceiling.

“If you say so,” she says, drawl-y and punch drunk and you have never wanted to hit and/or fuck someone worse.

“But you are too young.” You resist your petulance and stand up, unfold, take the long steps to reach her chair, her bow-spread legs- Jesus fuck- with trigger-happiness sewn into the lines of your limbs. She doesn't even glance up, lets you fall into a standstill, nerves akimbo despite your promised and genuine experience with women and sex and drugs and rock and roll. You've done this a million times. Fucksake you were- are- a info broker but the arch of her swanneck is making you nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs (2064, Jack Morrison).

“More,” you say because that's what you've taken to calling her instead of her Fate's-brood name, a feigned slip-up, overdone latina lilt, “More, c'mon, I'm joking.”

You crouch down with knees popping like twin pistols and rest your chin on one of her knees, elbow on the other. Her face is amused and aloof in calculated measures.

“But kiss me and we'll call it even.”

“Kiss you?” She asks, laughter made words, and you sympathize heavily with the frog prince.

“Kiss me,” you say, a little firmer, a little more red.

“That's worth more than a dimebag.”

“Oh,” you say, and only then you remember stories of babes in the wood, of music and nails, horseshoes and salt crystals, “so this is a bargain, now, huh?”

She pulls her mouth up at the edges. “It always was, Sombra.”

You want a four-course meal of the way your name sounds in her personal tongue, the Moira-More-Gorgeous dialect. You hum, shift fully to your knees to stop the shaking in your thighs. Her leg is very solid, lukewarm, bony. You're waiting for the other pin to drop from all this indirect intimacy.

“I'll play. What do you want, babe?” You say, feeling the side of your mask dig into her leg, the mag ports tug in their scar tissue binds. Delicately, she hooks a finger under your chin. Under the lip of your shining face. Self-explanatory.

“No,” you say lowly, try not to jerk away from the gentle pull.

“How do you expect a kiss otherwise, dear?” She asks, overemphasizing dear, patronizing, and you're pretty sure your underwear is soaked through.

“I-” you begin, but she grips your jaw fully and draws you closer, nails dug in and stinging, and a strange drop-off air-depressurization in your sternum chokes you out.

“Show me,” she says, still languid, with as just as much red as you'd used.

“No” you repeat. Lying.

She releases your jaw and you're on your feet, world below your soles. You grasp her shoulders and push-pull, one slow backstep at a time, and you weren't really going anywhere but she's got her back against the wall, now, stuck between you and cinderblock. You take painstaking attention of the way your body trembles pressed against hers, the amphetamine-buzz of her sharp hips.

You reach up and click the tiny hidden grooves that release the strap, your peacefully healed ports and pull it off, marionette-like. The clatter of iron on the tile floor is jarring, jangling.

She kisses you. Her lips are thin and warm and just slightly saliva-wet, gasp-worthy, and she crooks her fingers into the short bit of hair at your nape and buries them there, forces you a little closer, just hard enough to make your neck ache and then her mouth opens. You think you feel your soul jump down her throat. You push her, defense and desperation, give her open-mouthed rotted-soft nothings until she fists what hair she can get a grip on and yanks you off.

“This was a mistake,” she says, half-lidded, looking at your from the bottom of her eyes, and you croak “Mine, or yours?”

She says “Yours,” and you have never thought about the grammatical implications of the phrase; that she answered you by referring to herself as you had just said you (Sombra, Olivia, hers, fuck, what are you on), she says “Let's get a look at you first.”

The tug on your scalp coaxes you back, a forearm’s length away like she needs reading glasses or just wants to watch the shadows slide across your naked face. Your heart beats about once every five seconds, overhard boom-BOOM jolts pressing dents into your lungs, and you try so hard to stand still and take it but you can feel her watching you, your audience, no rock to dive under.

“Like what you see?” you ask, shakily.

“Can't be serious for five seconds,” she mutters, angles your face to the side and cocks her head, appraising, birdlike. “Still, I do rather like it. You,” she adds, as an afterthought.

“I think I'm in love with you,” you say, choosing to ignore the burning warning signs and go pedal to the metal.

“Yes, you do.”

You whimper pathetically, direct translation, an appeal to pathos in the most literary sense. It feels bitter in your nose.

Then she steps out from under you. Discreetly pushes your hands from her hips, says “Alright, enough,” claps her hands together chalkdust-style and cracks your heart between her palms.

“What?” you say, dumbly.

“Do try and keep this between us,” she says, cheerful, smiling to herself and not to you, “Morrison is already chomping at the bit to slap an OTH on me, the chancer.” But she watches your face until you stoop and retrieve the fake one.

“I,” you begin, a second sentence dead from the beginning. She goes mmm-hmmhm and pats your- properly covered, now - cheek, pulls her lab coat off your dirty college-student chair and drapes it over her shoulders as she heads for the door.

“You're a smart girl. Don't take it personally,” she says, and you feel like such a godfucked fool. 

\---

You don't really know how serious this is. You can handle her as a concept, in general, you can tell Mcree she's a milf for gross-out points and you can stick mistletoe into your bra, hang it above her lab's door in case that falls flat. You can flirt with the strong, sweet Amari girl, the bubblegum flimsy doctor who's barely older than you. Maybe you can be a normal fucking person, too, you do have a fair and good track record with these things. But.

But you have nightmares about her eyes lolling and her cheekbones vanished under bloat and you, maskless, emaciated, leaning over her carcass and tearing up long, dripping mouthfuls. You have dreams about telling her of those nightmares and they turn wet when she curls up her lip and calls you a sick fuck in that voice, that picture-worth-more-than-a-thousand-words voice because you never can tell if she's lying or sarcastic or she just wants something from you. You want everything from her. You want mouthfuls. 

\---

You just.

\---

You just.

\---

“And what do you want me to say, girl?”

You stomp into her precious lab like a headwind hits the coast, throwing your gun, your coat to the side and hoping they hit something experimental and delicate to hear it break on the floor, maybe make her jump a little bit but, yeah, you'd have to fire a round straight into her gut to rattle her.

“Se ve como- does it look like I can fucking- does it look like I can answer that?”

She sighs, a low growl trailing at the end of the sound and you snarl right back, give up the ghost of whatever act you’d decided on for her today.

“Sombra,” she says, and you turn about, face crumpled like a discarded newspaper but she can't see that, can she, you say “O'Deorian,” butchering the pronunciation in a deliberate departure from More and Gorgeous and whatever wet-dream names you made for this damn sirena- dama blanca- psico.

“You are acting like a child.”

“Yeah, I'm- according to you I am a child, goddammit.”

She leans against her counter and watches you pace in tight circles, boots scuffing up her sterile floor, hands scraping against your legs and rippling the leather because it would be so sweet to grab up your gun and shoot, shatter through the wall of her glass castle.

She says “Som- Olivia, you're sixteen. I don't care-” and she sees your shoulders hunch, “ I do not care how many people you've murdered. I do not care how many girls you've bed.”

“Fuck,” you mutter.

“And I absolutely do not care how much you think you love me.”

Your stomach twists and god, you are one hell of a masochist: a thin shimmer of arousal is heating you up outside-in. You've almost managed to sexualize dread, anxiety. Her bare indifference. Flat denial. You turn on your heel again and face her, sweating in uncomfortable places, equal parts miserable, pissed-off and horny. She has the gall to throw something like a sympathetic look towards you.

“Fuck you,” you say, but your voice cracks halfway through. Her lab rings with the embarrassment, silence, pressing at your eardrums. She doesn't even flinch.

“What do you want me to say?” She repeats.

The clasp on your thigh holster sticks with disuse but you yank your knife out solid, the first one-pieced motion you've managed since walking in here, lunge forward and slam the knife into the counter right between her fingers. She blinks twice, seems genuinely startled, and by then you've got the other knife whipped out and held stabbing-point down over her heart. The aim is unintentional but you trust in what/whoever is guiding your hand. You were going for the throat anyway. Her eyes narrow to slits, thin chest heaving and barely brushing the blood-draw sharp point with every breath, the blade held as unwaveringly as her gaze.

“What are you doing?” she spits from between gritted teeth. You focus down at her dark-veined right hand instead of making first eye contact. You're panting, somehow, like a dog in heat, audible harsh-in harsh-out that you know she can hear. It doesn't feel like you're breathing at all, like you're suffocating, carbon monoxide is the playground bully of poison, just muscles the oxygen outta tha away.

You rip the mask off. It joins the rest of your shit on the floor with a spectacular shattering-school bell ring.

“If I hurt you, you’d hurt me back,” you say. It is not a question.

“You've lost your mind-”

“Would you?” You say, frantic, that is a question.

“Oliva,” she hisses, goes to pull her hand away from the knife splintering open her countertop, “Set down the knives.”

You wrench it out and shove it right back in, pinning her sleeve into the new crack. “No. Answer me.”

She hesitates. Visibly, a hover about her lips, her nose, her knitted brows. Her red- no, no, black- right hand flexes. You feel rather than hear the joints click.

You simply say “Please,” not meaning anything but that. For once in a blue moon you've timed it right, could fool yourself that she does as you ask; presses that corruption blueblack dead thing into your side, right in the curvature between your hip and your ribs, right where it scrape-pull-burns like all fucksake and if you hadn't blacked out in seconds you would have screamed to bloody your windpipe.

\---

You dream whilst out. Something like this;

The knives go in, up. The plastic-faultline snap of the counter. Beakers rattling. She says “and what are you going to do?”, sharp, her long nose scrunched with the force of her wild grin, spat through gritted teeth. You're panting. Her hand moves, you pin it. Romans crucified people from the wrist, not the hand, 'cause you can tear free of that and so centuries of Stigmata are hoaxed. The space between her radius and ulna is shockingly yielding.

“Gonna kill you, obviously,” you say, actions speaking louder than words. She cries out, short, mercykill cutoff, and her eyes water but she says “No you won't.”

“Ye of little faith,” you say, holding your breath. She curls her red right hand around the hilt of your oversharp hunting knife- do you know what this is for, it's for skinning deer (Jennifer’s Body, 2009, dir. Karyn Kusama)- and forces the blade into her own thin, heaving chest. It cracks like a sheet of ice: said to sound like a gunshot. This sounds like a shattering school bell.

You gape. Your knees give out and you fall lock-jointed into her, boneless, puffed-cheeked stifling a moan or a scream or maybe just a whimper because you, characteristically, just creamed your jeans.

She grunts once and that’s all. Her hand slides off the hilt. Lets you prove it. You double the pressure with all the weight left in your rubbery body and shove the blade all the way into her heart. Bullseye. You can hear it hit home as clear as if you'd ripped it out with your teeth.

**Author's Note:**

> 15-85-3


End file.
